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How to summarize a compare and contrast essay

Summarizing an essay can be stressful because you've already done the work to write it, and now you have to write it again in a shorter format. This extra time to summarize the compare and contrast essay won't be much if you know how to do it. Summarizing isn't actually that difficult as long as you follow the tips in this article. Compare and contrast essays follow a simple format that you can mirror in your summarization.

Summarizing your Essay

No matter what reason your teacher needs a summary of this essay, there's a basic format to most summaries you can use. For the most part, a summary will have a sentence for each paragraph in your essay. That includes the introduction, but not necessarily the conclusion. Since the introduction introduces new information, it's useful to summarize but the conclusion only is a longer summary so you don't need to include it.

In fact, if you're running out of time for your summary, you could simply reword your conclusion from the essay and use that. It depends on how long your summary needs to be, and the other requirements that your teacher needs for this assignment. You can also ask other students how they are doing their summaries.

Start with your main topic. This is the most important part, so it should go first.

Write one or two sentences about each paragraph you have, or each argument if you're writing an argumentative essay

A summary needs to say the most important parts of your essay while not giving away too many details of it

Keep in mind the length that your teacher wants for the summary

There really isn't much work to a summary; all you need to do is follow these tips in the above list and check with what your teacher wants. If you're unsure about any part of the writing process, talk to your classmates or your teacher. Getting help with a summary for a compare and contrast essay is something a lot of students do, so don't feel bad. You can even look online for examples of summaries that can help you with figuring out the structure more clearly. If you wanted to, you could probably get this whole summary finished in one day. Once you get going on your summary it doesn't take long because you already know all this stuff from research and writing the essay.